The Sat Nav had other ideas about how to reach Staletti, which is how I found myself wedged down a lane barely wide enough for a shopping trolley, frantically reversing while a local nonno watched from his doorway with the amused patience of a man who has seen this exact scene a hundred times before. My wife was gripping the door handle. The children had gone suspiciously quiet in the back. "Dad's doing an adventure," announced my youngest, which is her code for Dad has made a terrible mistake.

We eventually found the proper road, a winding affair that hugged the Calabrian coastline with casual indifference to anyone prone to motion sickness. The villa sat perched above the Ionian Sea, a modest stone building with terracotta roof tiles and bougainvillea climbing every available surface like it was trying to escape into the sky. My first thought, embarrassingly, was that it looked exactly like the photographs, which says more about my general cynicism regarding holiday rentals than anything else.

The key was where the owner said it would be, in a rusted metal box that required the sort of delicate negotiation usually reserved for defusing explosives. I dropped it twice. The door opened with a satisfying creak that suggested both character and possibly some maintenance issues, and we stepped into cool tile-floored darkness that smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and old wood.

The kitchen immediately became command central. Not because it was grand, but because it was compact in that specific Mediterranean way where every drawer contains something unexpected. A corkscrew, yes, but also a mallet. Fourteen coffee cups, none matching. A single chopstick. My wife opened the fridge, which hummed with the determination of an appliance that had been running since the nineties, and we performed the traditional holiday ritual of buying too much at the local market and then wondering where to put it all. The tomatoes went on the windowsill. The cheese sweated in its paper. Someone had already opened the wine, and I am not saying it was me before noon, but I am not not saying that either.

The children discovered the pool before I could issue any warnings about depth or behaviour, emerging shrieking and delighted while I stood on the terrace with my coffee, watching the sea glitter in the middle distance. The terrace itself was where we spent that first afternoon, really. Just moving between sun and shade, arguing about who would cook, establishing the crucial holiday rule that whoever makes the coffee is temporarily exempt from washing up. The bougainvillea dropped petals into my drink. A gecko watched from the wall with what I chose to interpret as approval.

By evening, the mishap of the morning felt like it had happened to someone else, or at least to a version of myself I was prepared to find amusing. We ate bread that was genuinely terrible for our digestion and genuinely essential for our happiness. The children fell asleep where they sat, sun-drunk and pasta-heavy. My wife and I stayed out, listening to the sea and the crickets and the distant sound of someone else's barbecue, and I thought about how holidays with small children are never quite the escape you imagine, but sometimes they are something better, something messier and more specific, something that belongs only to that particular week in that particular place, with its particular rusted key box and its particular view.

The nonno was right to be amused. We were always going to find our way here eventually.